This might be the last time that you read my blog.
This might be the last time that I write a post on this blog.
This might be the last time I put up with a dropped call on my cell phone.
As Seth Godin says:
With so many choices, every business lives right on the edge. When you were the only florist in my town, storming off in a huff cost me as much as it cost you. Now, it's sort of trivial to just type a few different letters into my browser.
The Web 2.0 Blog offers 16 ways to get you going along the right path (if you’re into those sorts of things).
I’m not sure that I care about this; I was really hoping for a full-screen video iPod. There still doesn’t seem to be any sort of proper remote for the iPod — would have been much cooler if there was a video out on the HiFi that just provided a GUI for navigating iPod content (for that matter there doesn’t appear to be any video out, which seems a little silly).
Kevin 2.0 reports that you can just go to the ad agency that worked on the Origami Project and find the full specs. I tried it:
Worked for me.
Scoble says it’s a device and Engadget claims that these are pictures from a good source; both seem to agree that it’s a new device from Microsoft.
Whatever it is, the viral is pretty effective with the information on the official site only releasing information on a weekly basis — the next update is 3/2/06.
Do you know what human directional advertising is? Picture the dude in a chicken suit. Got a good mental image? Good. Apparently “human directional advertising” is the technical term for dressing up in a goofy suit or holding an advertisement on a corner.
I’d never hear the term before.
Micro Persuasion points to the Ruby on Rails wiki that lists out all of the web 2.0 applications that have been developed with Ruby on Rails. Some of the interesting ones that I found were:
Now that I’ve developed my short list, I’m going to have to go play with everything and see if I’ll integrate anything into my daily use. Stay tuned . . .
I had no idea that was the case until I read a post about it on TUAW. Perhaps I’ll turn my Mac Mini into an intranet server for my house.
Ok, it’s actually not a bad list, but it’s a little hard to look at.
I originally saw a version of this on Micropersuasion, but was screwing up some of the operators when I tried to make it work for my blog, so I did a Google search and came up with this site, which I thought would generate the URL for my mobile site; it didn’t.
Here’s what you have to do to get this to work for your site:
Ultimately it seems like it might be easier to make a bookmark to the Google site on your phone and type in the URL of the site you are looking to view on your mobile.
I was playing around with 4INFO today and it’s pretty cool. To test the functionality, I send a SMS to 44636 with “united 352” as the subject and got a reply in about 30 seconds with flight data detail. 4INFO supports lots of things in much the same way like weather, sports scores, etc.
What I really want to see is if 4INFO starts sending me SMS advertising now that I’ve used their service. Although 4INFO is a free service, I have to imagine that there is going to be some sort of advertising component that will come into play at some point; certainly their privacy policy is very clear:
4INFO displays targeted advertisements based on personal information. Advertisers (including ad serving companies) may assume that people who interact with, view, or click on targeted ads meet the targeting criteria - for example, women who have searched for nail salons in a particular geographic area.
All of the information that 4INFO provides I can easily access with my Treo, but I could definitely see how this would be a useful service if you did not have data services active on a phone or did not even have a web browsing option on a phone. I could definitely see a mobile carrier acquiring a company like this or simply cloning its service offerings as a driver for SMS usage instead of advertising revenue.
Go It Alone! can be read in its entirety on the web. Harper Collins, the publisher of the book is attempting to support the free version with Google Advertising on every page (yes, you click through every single page of the book to read it online and every page has Google Ads on the side). In addition to the Google Ads, there is also a direct-buy Amazon link that allows you to purchase the printed version of the book; it appears as though Harper Collins has an affiliate ID set up so that they can get paid a percentage of all generated sales from the site, meaning that they would make whatever they make in wholesale plus a percentage of retail.
It will be interested to see what the conversion numbers are (if Harper Collins ever releases them) and the advertising revenue generated by the site (if Harper Collins ever releases that number). I wonder what the split of Google Ads revenue is with the author (if there’s any split at all).
I called United yesterday to book a flight. Normally I only book online, but I had a ticket that I had cancelled and there is no way on United.com to apply a previously purchased and not used ticket to a new reservation.
As I proceeded through using the IVR phone system, I was never once given the opportunity to tell the system that I was trying to do a ticket exchange. Finally at the end of the IVR system and I arriving at the correct combination of flights, I had to say “speak to an agent” about 30 times before the system finally transferred me to a human.
Surprisingly the human that I spoke to sounded non-Indian, so we were able to converse quite easily. I gave the agent the ticket number of the ticket I was trying to exchange and then was put on hold for 5 minutes.
When the agent came back, he told me that he would have to charge me a $100 change fee, which I was fine with, and then $10 for a phone booking. I requested that he instruct me how to do the ticket exchange on the website and I would be happy to not take any more of his time on the phone. He replied that there was not currently a way that I could do a ticket exchange on United.com, so I informed him that there was currently no way that I was going to pay $10 in addition to a $100 change fee if there was no other method for exchanging my ticket — he put me on hold again.
Five minutes later, the agent told me that he had spoken with his supervisor and the supervisor agreed to waive the $10 phone booking fee. I completed my reservation and immediately received my new flight receipt by e-mail.
United offers some pretty cool bonuses for booking on United.com like receiving 1000 miles for every United.com booking; to be honest, I would have rather done the whole process described above on United.com, but United has not added that feature. I can totally understand that United is trying to push as much of their bookings to their website — if they can convert some percentage of people per year to online bookings then I’m sure they can reduce overhead costs in their call centers. However, it is absolutely ridiculous that United is attempting to charge people $10 when they have no choice but to call in a reservation because United.com does not contain the features that would have prevented the phone call needing to be made.
If you need to call United for a reservation because their website does not support what you are trying to do, I suggest that you refuse to pay the $10 fee; obviously they have empowered supervisors to waive the fee in certain situations (or maybe I just got really lucky).
Think Secret’s track record speaks for itself, so I was excited to hear that many of the rumors of the next gen video iPod having a large touchscreen video display; I’m glad that I did not take the plunge on the current generation of video iPods. Nothing firm on the release date, but Think Secret did have this to day:
Additional details concerning the new iPod have yet to be confirmed, including capacity and a release date, although all indications point to the Spring, possibly as early as late March or early April.
I hope it’s right around April 1 because that’s when I start to get busy traveling. As an aside, I hope that TivoToGo for Mac is released right around the same time as the new video iPod.
Uniquely flavored toothpaste to fit your life. I want to try the espresso and curry because I can’t possibly imagine using those flavors to brush my teeth.
Unlike a lot of the free consumer offerings, CentralDesktop is designed for business and does cost money (ok, there is a free 25MB option, but it’s a limited number of users and doesn’t have a lot of the advanced features that paid plans options). Looking at the screenshots, CentralDesktop seems to provide a lot of the same features that SharePoint provides, but is a hosted solution, so an IT department doesn’t have to worry about the server, purchasing and supporting the software, etc. Also, CentralDesktop is available from everywhere unlike a lot of internal corporate SharePoint sites that require VPN software to access.
Scoble wrote a post about becoming an A-Lister in blogging because he gets asked that question a lot. While Scoble’s post is interesting, I like Jeremy Wright’s take on how not to become and A-List blogger, which I found very interesting — you should check it out.
Fundamentally Jeremy’s post causes me (maybe you too) to question why it is that you are blogging. I freaked out the other day when I say that direct visits to my site had dropped dramatically; I comforted myself by checking distribution of my FeedBurner feed and the number of subscriptions to my feed on Bloglines. Then I reality-checked myself: I started this blog for me and if others happen to read it, that’s great. Certainly it’s nice to be famous and nice to be able to say how many visitors you have; I think at one time or another everyone is focused on the amount of notoriety that they can get and blogging and social software certainly makes it easier than the old metrics of getting your name in the newspaper.
I’ve resolved that I’m not going to look at my tracking metrics for the rest of the week, which, considering that I used to check them more than twice a day, is a big thing for me. Perhaps once I break the cycle of looking at them all the time, I’ll never look at them again.
Why are you blogging? Who are you blogging for? Do you really need to be an A-Lister?
Check out Seth Godin’s blog post on “The Reason:”
The reason the typewriter keyboard is in a weird order is that original typewriters jammed, and they needed to rearrange the letters to keep common letters far apart.
The reason that Blockbuster exists is that VCR tapes used to cost more than $100.
At least I can now access my iTunes content and iPhoto content on my Mini running Tiger, but it’s still a bummer that they haven’t provided TivoToGo support yet.
Engadget is reporting that Taser will be releasing a shotgun model of their popular non-lethal arsenal. Apparently the shotgun will be effective to a 30 meter range and the projectiles will not be tethered to the unit as they are in the handgun model.
I’m guessing that Taser is introducing this size weapon to compete with the current arsenal of shotgun-size non-lethal weapons that fire beanbags and rubber balls or pellets.
I’ve seen people shot by Taser weapons and it’s certainly not an experience that I would want to have, though I bet that it’s better than being shot with a bullet.
I was watching Airline and noticed on the board that they had designated a cancelled flight at “CNCLX”, the “X” obviously standing in for the -elled portion of the rest of the word. That got me thinking about all the other uses of “x”
Seems like you could create your own language as long as the person/people on all sides of the conversations knew what the “x” was standing in for.
Perhaps I’ll become Rx, the person formally known as “Ross,” where “x” means “oss”; although I’d hate for people to think that my parents named me “prescription” or “receive,” so perhaps I won’t after all.
“Windows Defender” is the new and final name for Windows AntiSpyware. Lots of improvements in the beta 2 version of this product (the name, of course, not necessarily being an improvement).
I did the last-minute Valentine’s day card shopping today. Albertsons was out of cards (at least the kind I could give to my wife), but there were about 10 guys in the aisle trying to figure out how to make what was there work for their special someone. Disappointed, I went to Walgreens, which still had a good selection of cards, though most of them were very large.
The guy in the aisle with me kept grabber progressively larger cards, and so I made the effort to inform him that most women say that size doesn’t matter, which he found not funny at all. I was amused by the fact that he walked away with a 8x14 card after I made the comment — apparently size matters to him (or to his wife/girlfriend).
Happy Valentine’s Day!
I was reading a post on Engadget that has detailed instructions on how to build a scaler. It got me thinking that I actually have a scaler lying around (don’t ask) and that maybe I should try to use it to make the signal from my TiVo to my plasma more crisp and defined. One of my big frustrations with TiVo is the lack of HDMI, DVI, or component outputs; I am using s-video, but I can visibly see the difference between the component video connection and the s-video connection.
If the external scaler I have works as well as the screen grabs on the Engadget post, I’ll be pretty excited.
I’d love feedback from anyone out there that is a video whiz on whether or not the scaler will make a difference and anything that I need to think about when using a scaler. Basically, just to provide a little more info, I’m looking at taking the TiVo feed into the s-video in on the scaler and sending the signal through the component video out (I’m not sure that the scaler I have actually has a HDMI out on it).
Just enter what your are trying to convert from (i.e., “1/4 teaspoon”) and what you are trying to convert to (i.e., “ml”) and the first result will have a little calculator symbol next to it with the correct result. The link below is an example that converts 1/4 teaspoon to ml.
Read all about it on his post through the link below — it all makes sense to me. I actually liked his previous idea about every Gmail user having to pay a buck by credit card and use their real name, but we’re past that now.
I did and it’s a great listen. Sure, it’s available in video too, but I couldn’t get it to work on 2 different PCs or my Mac. Believe me that it’s worth just hearing without the visuals.
They don't measure how good your service is. Or how optimal your product is.
They measure how well you did compared to expectations. They measure how well people rank you in the survey.
That’s what Seth Godin says and he’s not wrong. Remember how you used to take tests that you could game if you were a good test taker? Basically those kinds of tests only tested how well you took tests, not how well you knew the material. Same difference.
Seth Godin has 2 great posts about getting traffic and about how long people actually pay attention to your site.
Regarding getting more traffic:
The problem, of course, is in the "get." The request has at its foundation the assumption that what you've built has somehow earned attention. "Our business model is working great--we just need more traffic..."
People never say, "how can I earn more traffic?" or "How can I rethink the core of what I'm offering so that it organically attracts people who want to see it?"
Getting traffic is a little like getting a date. You can probably manipulate the system for a little while (I had a roommate in college who was great at it) but self-reinvention is a markedly better long-term strategy.
If you believe Seth’s next post, then you will have left before you even get close to reading this part. Why?
Fact: about half the visitors to your website leave after less than five seconds.
Do you see the correlation? If you are earning traffic, chances are good that you are earning more of people’s time. And hopefully if you’re doing things right, then people are opting to subscribe to your feed and you’re not worried about them visiting your site directly.
Chris O'Donnell published a post that excerpts some thoughts originally published on this post by David Friedman:
One of the assumptions built into the conventional version of K-12 schooling, private and public, is that there is some subset of human knowledge, large enough to occupy most of twelve years of school, that everyone needs to know. That assumption is false. There is a very short list of skills-reading, writing or typing, and simple arithmetic are the only ones that occur to me-that almost everyone will find worth learning.
I’ve go to agree with Chris in that I really like the shorter explanation:
I sometimes describe it as throwing books at them and seeing which ones stick.
Church of the Customer posted the image below, which is originally from this post on the Beyond Robson blog:
Steve Rubel asks that question and provides a primer for when (not if) your company is faced with a blog crisis. It’s sure nice when someone else does the work for you. Check it out.
I generally try to avoid Costco on the weekends because it’s just a madhouse. However, yesterday I just needed to go, so I braved the crowds at 1PM. Here are few observations:
Most of all, if you go to Costco during a busy time, simply acknowledge to yourself that it’s going to be busy and try to slow down and relax.
This was originally posted on my HOBDenver blog, but I wanted to share it with all Strategize readers as well.
I bet that you’ve never heard of Beatport. Beatport is a local Colorado company serving paid downloads to the somewhat niche market of dance music. You will find remixes of popular artist tunes and original content all available for sale. It used to be that you couldn’t get a lot of the great dance music and DJ remixes in an easy way, but Beatport has changed all that.
No special software downloads required, everything works directly in the browser and works perfectly with Firefox. As you would expect with any digital music store, you can play track samples, some songs are available as singles, and some songs are only available as part of an album purchase.
I was checking out “Their Low The Singles 1990–2005” Parts I & II by The Prodigy, a band I still enjoy listening to — haven’t seen those albums on iTunes.
Beatport offers a variety of delivery methods: instant delivery (mp3 or mp4 tracks), mail delivery (mp3, mp4, or wav CDs).
Oh, and Beatport averages something like 75,000 downloads per week.
Very interesting: Google is offering Gmail accounts for your entire domain. They note right on the front page that all of the e-mail is hosted on Google’s servers. Please note that you will have to go through a qualification procedure to qualify your organization for the beta (and you’ll need a Google ID to access the qualification procedure).
I didn’t until I read a post about it on Lifehacker. Luckily you can secure everything stored in Firefox by setting a master password — full instructions in the link below.
Steve Rubel’s done it for AdWeek and Mediapost using Google News and Feedburner. Check it out.
The simple solution, of course, is simply to RSS-enable your news site.
That’s the name of RIM’s work-around solution if the existing Blackberry service is shut off. See the links below if you want more information.
The Art of Recruiting — The art of recruiting is the purest form of evangelism because you're not simply asking people to try your product, buy your product, or partner with you. Instead, you are asking them to bet their lives on your organization. Can it get any scarier for them, and tougher for you, than this? Guy has a lot of great points and things to think about if you a responsible for any type of recruiting/hiring at your company.
The Art of Schmoozing — It's taken me twenty years, but I've figured out that it's much easier to make a sale, build partnerships, create joint ventures--you name it--with people that you already know than with people you just met. The key is to establish a relationship before you need it. And this is why I'd like to provide the art of schmoozing. Schmoozing is tough stuff and it’s hard to do right because there isn’t a lot of information on how to do it right, which is what makes this such a great post by Guy — 20 years of experience distilled into a blog post.
The Effective Emailer — I have strong feelings about email etiquette and what it takes to get your email read--and answered. As someone who gets dozens of emails every day and sends a handful of emails every day to get strangers to do things (“digital evangelism”), I offer these insights to help you become a more effective emailer. I have strong feelings about effective e-mailing as well that tend to be nearly the same as Guy’s. Please read his post and apply his rules today.
The Art of Rainmaking — You can blow all the smoke that you like about brand awareness, corporate image, and feedback from early adopters, but you either make it rain or you don't. Sales is just damn important. In many companies, salespeople report to people with lots of other stuff on their plate and those supervisors fail to realize that the most significant bottom-line revenue impact that they can make is spending most of their time supporting sales.
The Google Desktop Blog has a post detailing a lot of the new features in Google Desktop Search 3. One of the big, new features of Google Desktop Search is the ability to search files remotely, called “Search Across Computers.” It is very important to note that if you use the Search Across Computers function, you hard drive index data is loaded onto Google servers unlike in previous versions of Desktop Search where it was specifically stated that none of your data was stored on Google servers. The upside of storing on Google servers is that you can search data even if the machine you are trying to search is turned off; the downside is that your information is stored on Google’s servers. Search Across Computers specifically makes the following files searchable:
Hell, I’ll probably buy them for my daughter.
The cool part is that you can do this with any audio source, including DRM’d iTunes files; the bad part is that it’s pretty complex.
After a morning of getting absolutely crushed and overwhelmed by the response to its debut, Zillow is back up. Essentially Zillow provides instead valuations and data on homes all over the country. To test the service, I pulled up my house and was amazed to see the Google Maps satellite integration on my house and houses on my street with home values floating over each house. Going further, I checked out comp data, sales data, home facts, etc. and everything was right on.
This changes everything in the real estate business — now people will be as educated about home buying as they are about car buying: the curtain has been lifted.
I could not find a cohesive set of instructions on how to transfer e-mail from uReach to Gmail, so after figuring out how to do it myself, I’m posting the full primer. All of the following instructions involve using a machine running Windows XP SP2 — I’m sure there are ways to do this with other operating systems and earlier versions of Windows might work exactly the same way; I’m just telling you what I used as your mileage may vary.
The following instructions assume you have a uReach account that you want to transfer mail from and a Gmail account that you want to transfer e-mails to.
Preparation
uReach E-Mail Extraction
Outlook Express E-Mail Import
Thunderbird E-Mail Import
gExodus transfer to Gmail
Here’s what you need to know about gExodus:
If you have any questions, feel free to let me know and I’ll do my best to help. I accept no responsibility at all if something gets screwed up by your trying to follow these instructions; it’s obviously a complex process — you should feel good about the fact that, unless you delete the e-mails from your uReach account, uReach does not immediately delete items in your account during archiving.
Good luck and have fun.
Even though their website is completely overloaded, Songbird, the open-source alternative to iTunes, has launched for Windows today.
Here’s the splash page I saw when I logged in:
Click for a larger image.
As it says on the button — “Sweet”
Ok, what Malik suggests are not going to give you a full keyboard, but they are going to provide you with a lot of functionality. Note that his suggestions will probably not work on Verizon phones as Java support is required.
Dave Silfry of Technorati has posted an updated “State of the Blogosphere” report. Key numbers that I extracted:
There are a lot more figures and details in the post, so if you are interested, I suggest reading it.
You can watch them separately, or watch them all back-to-back. No sponsorship on the Google Video page.
It occurs to me that I neglected to name some of the services that I use all of the time in my original post, so here are the stragglers:
Part of the reason that I forgot the services above in my original post is because I don’t have them cohesively organized. What I’m thinking about doing because I keep all my bookmarks on del.icio.us is putting all my critical web apps in my bookmarks folder on Firefox and then using the bookmarks sidebar so that I can easily access them. In addition, I’m going to come up with a unique del.icio.us tag for all of the sites so that I can open the del.icio.us site in a tab if I’m not using my computer. If anyone has another suggestion on how to do this, I’d love to hear it. I suppose that I could use a personal start page like Pageflakes (which, by the way, is now working with Firefox) or Protopage, but I have not yet found a favorite.
I first read about coComment yesterday on Scoble’s post about it, so I headed over to check it out. coComment is in beta, but is accepting e-mail addresses for invites, so I left mine and was surprised to find an invitation this morning when I checked my e-mail.
coComment is designed to allow you to track your comments on blogs no matter what blog you leave them on, which, for those of you that leave lots of comments, know can be a total pain in the ass. After signing in and activating my account, I was instructed about the process:
From the FAQ, here’s what you do if you forget to click the bookmarklet:
Seems way easier to try and do this correctly the first time.
Due to the fact that coComment is in beta, it is only supporting the following blogging platforms:
Blogger.com
MSN Spaces
MySpaces
TypePad
Wordpress
XangaSo here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to publish this post, leave a comment on it, and then come back and edit this post with my experience from both the user side and the site administrator side. The edit will be slanted towards Blogger because that’s the platform that I use.
Stand by . . .
UPDATE:
. . . ok, so I entered the test comment that you can find by clicking the comment link. I entered the text of the comment, selected the radio button to designate it as an anonymous comment, and then input the text for the optical barrier (not sure if I needed to do that). After I had entered everything into the blog, I clicked the coComment bookmarklet, which brought up a small, green window that prompted me to enter my nickname/e-mail and password for the coComment service. After I entered that information, I noticed that a small logo had appeared next to the “Login and Publish” button on the blog comment page that had white “CO” lettering on a blue background with my nickname to the right of it.
Not seeing anything else happening, I hit the “Login and Publish” button and got an error message about cookies, which is when I realized that the eTrust Firewall was blocking the cookies from coComment. I added coComment to the firewall, disabled cookie blocking, and hit the “Login and Publish” button again — a small khaki-colored window showed up telling me that my comment was being submitted to the original blog and coComment and that was that.
Now here’s something interesting: I moderate my comments on Blogger as the blog administrator. The post below immediately showed up in coComment even though I had not yet actually approved comment publishing in Blogger. I suppose this doesn’t really matter too much, but it’s interesting to note.
I then commented on the post while logged into my Blogger profile and without using the coComment bookmarklet. Now, nothing showed up in coComment because I did not use the bookmarklet, exactly as I expected. There is a way to set up alerts, but I have not done that.
A few more things that I noticed:
TechCrunch has a post about coComment with some screenshots.
I have to say that I’m pretty impressed with the product and will be using it extensively.
I’m just curious because I can’t seem to get it to work on mine. I think it has something to do with Pandora being a Flash-based player.
Please let me know if you’ve figured out a way to get this working.
No, I’m not replacing Strategize. The address of the new blog is http://hobdenver.blogspot.com and I would appreciate if you give it a look. Content is a little light at this point as I recently finished locking in the template, making adjustments to the template, building a supporting Squidoo lens, etc.
I work for House of Blues Concerts in Denver, so the content on my other blog will be House of Blues Concerts and music-focused. I’m happy to address any questions that anyone has (to the point that I can do so legally) and would appreciate any questions to get the content flowing.
In perusing the blogosphere, I’ve found that the music business is very under-represented, so I’m going to attempt to give as much of a view “behind the curtain” (or behind the barricade) as I can.
Any feedback is much appreciated.
AutoBlog is reporting that Microsoft Windows Automotive, named “Blue & Me” to characterize bluetooth integration and a one-to-one relationship with the driver, will debut at this year’s Geneva Auto Show. There are apparently all kinds of features like voice operated controls and a USB port in the glove compartment that is compatible with all kinds of smartphones, MP3 players, and memory sticks.
No mention of how the ctrl-alt-del combination is entered if you have to reboot.
Google has a tool that allows you to send a text message to any cell phone in the United States. Check it out.